Bright Young Things
by Trivial Pursuit
Summary: They say a picture's worth a thousand words...


**Author's Note: Hello m'dears! I'm ever so sorry for my prolonged non-updating of my stories (Which I'm trying to wrap up due to a spectacular loss of inspiration). But here's a new one. It's just a one-shot so I won't have to worry about coming up with ideas to extend it.**

**Disclaimer: I will own _Harry Potter_ when pigs fly.**

** *Author's Legal Representation would like to say that the Author makes this statement under the assumption that porcine flight is an impossibility and is not responsible in the case of actual flying swine.**

We are such stuff  
As dreams are made on

-Prospero, _The Tempest,_ Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

Harry Potter was having trouble sleeping, insomnia and an ever-present dread filled him to the bones and chased away an always elusive sleep. He rolled over in his- in _Sirius_' bed, landing on top of a giant lump in the bed he'd been trying to cleverly avoid for most of the night. Harry tried to flatten the lump out by gently jiggling his weight on it but it just shifted from side to side. Finally, Harry climbed out of the bed and started to fish under it, holding the mattress up with one hand and scrabbling along the slats of the bed with the other.

Harry's fingers finally came across a flat, oblong box. Stretching slightly, he pulled the box towards him and set it down on the floor. The box was made of black lacquered wood with the Black family crest set in silver in the lid. Harry raised the top apprehensively, remembering that, despite who's room he was in, he was still in the house of Black, a family who had possessed some _very_ nasty Dark objects. But if Harry was expecting something along the lines of a cursed necklace or mind controlling book he was sorely disappointed. The box was full to the brim with photos, nothing too racy like the images that adorned Sirius' bedroom walls, mostly pictures of family and friends. In almost every image was a girl, one who looked strangely familiar yet whom Harry couldn't quite place. This girl who was most undoubtedly a Black, with the same long black hair, pale skin, stormy grey eyes, and predatory air of insanity about her as Sirius had. Though many of the pictures were clearly taken at family gatherings and Sirius and the girl are obviously related, they held each other just a _tad_ too close and looked at each other with _slightly_ too much affection for the relationship to be wholly innocent. Sirius had never talked about a Woman, sure he'd talked about girls he'd slept with, flings and flavours-of-the-month, but never anybody who'd been more then that. Never anybody who he'd loved as much as he obviously loved this _girl_.

Harry picked out a picture that had been torn in half, one that he recognized to be the other half of one that Sirius had given him. He fished his half out of his rucksack and laid the two pictures together on the rumpled bedspread. In Sirius' half the girl's face is barely visible through the window of what Sirius had told Harry to be his post-Hogwarts flat and in Harry's his parents, Sirius, and the rest of the Marauders were squished together on the couch, laughing at some long-forgotten joke, though Photo-Sirius keeps shooting looks towards the window where the girl was hidden.

Harry held up a picture from the bottom of the stack, one that was clearly much loved by it's late owner. The edges were bent and softened and most of the new-photo sheen had worn off. The girl had her arms wrapped around Harry's godfather's' neck and a leg braced against his thigh. Sirius in turn had his arms twined tightly around her waist. They were both laughing silently at some private joke like it was the funniest thing in the world, with their heads thrown back and their teeth bared in a kind of predatory mirth.

Harry had never seen Sirius look so _alive_ as he did in those pictures, not in ones with James and the other Marauders, not with his many nameless girlfriends, not drunk, not sober, not happy, not sad. _Never_. Harry turned the picture over, squinting in the dim light to make out the nearly illegible scrawl on the back.

'_Les Terreurs, 1975._' That was all, no names, no location, nothing to give a clue to the girl's identity.

Harry had collected various images of his parents and their friends, tucking them into the photo album Hagrid had given him in his first year, greedily amassing any remembrances of the family he never got to enjoy. Yet for some reason he found himself unable to add these images to his collection. They were moments in time that Sirius had meant to keep private, pictures he never wanted anyone else to see. So Harry tucked the various pictures back in the box and slid it into a bedside drawer, and falling into a tumultuous sleep.

* * *

Nine months later the Battle of Hogwarts is raging and Molly Weasley is dueling Bellatrix Lestrange and Bellatrix is laughing, and all Harry can see is the girl from the photo with her arms wrapped around his godfather's neck and the silvery eyes that had no inkling of the demented abyss they would become.

So Harry salutes her, salutes the girl in the photo who stole his godfather's heart and could make him feel oh-so-_alive_, he salutes her and she smiles, smiles the smile she smiled those twenty years ago, smiles the smile that was reserved for Sirius alone.

A flash of green light hits her and she's falling,

falling,

falling,

falling.

She dies with his laugh etched on her lips.


End file.
